MoxVib

The two men, match-made artistically by STPI's Osaka-born chief printer Eitaro Ogawa, have teamed up to create a series of woodblock prints that reproduce Shieh's trademark, delicate drawings in the gongbi (Ming dynasty-era fine-line brush painting) style, using the labour-intensive ukiyo-e process.

The collaboration has been two years in the brewing, and will culminate in an exhibition next year. In 2006, while doing a residency at STPI, Shieh asked Ogawa if there were printmakers in Japan still working in the Edo (1603-1867) ukiyo-e style. The answer was yes, and the two men happily hatched a plan to rope in Kyoto-based Kitamura to help them realise a woodcut print project.

Kitamura, 40, recounts that his first thoughts upon checking out Shieh's works on the Internet was: 'Wow, ukiyo-e!' The carver, who started training in the art form at the age of 23 under established names such as Akira Kurosaki and Osanu Hotta, found the distinct key lines in the Hong Kong artist's drawings similar to those in ancient ukiyo-e prints. Intrigued, he was eager to apply his skills to carving them.

Shieh says that from an art history point of view, the earliest Japanese woodblock prints were influenced by Chinese prints dating back to the 15th century. The Japanese explored the medium's possibilities, developing it into a unique technique representing their land. 'You can say Kitamura and I have the same artistic origins,' the tall, 38-year-old painter adds.

Last December, Shieh sent sketches in his signature gongbi style to Kitamura, who carved intricate woodblock samples from the meticulous drawings. By mailing these samples to-and-fro between Hong Kong and Japan, they selected four images to be made into editions at STPI. They finally met for the first time at the end of last month and worked shoulder-to-shoulder in Singapore until yesterday - with Ogawa as translator and supervisor - to execute the actual prints.

'The fun part is that we can always change the colour in printing. So I don't really need to decide the colour until the last moment. It leaves space for me to imagine,' says Shieh.

While the working method on Shieh's new print series harks back to a historical period that marked the beginning of modern Japan - complete with advances in mass production, and the proliferation of metropolitan culture - its subject matter has a closed, intimate and timeless quality to it. The prints depict nude men acrobatically contorting themselves into lutes, violins, double basses and harps. Women in the buff pluck serenely at their male counterparts' strings, and au naturel children hold up sheet music.

A popular, decade-old motif in the painter's oeuvre, this Musical Families series literally fleshes out the physical and spiritual process that is music-making. Shieh admits he revisited the concept because previous incarnations have all been sold, and he wanted to assemble his own such family again.

The pictures are both subtle and meditative. But like the erotic shunga, meaning 'spring pictures' in Japanese - an illicit genre in ukiyo-e - the imagery is also undeniably sensual. Insisting that the nude figures are 'something proper' in this project, Shieh adds with the utmost seriousness that the pornographic in ukiyo-e is 'interesting art any way you look at it'. Some day, he, too, hopes to make his own pornographic series.

Shieh is only the latest in a long line of contemporary artists who are fascinated with the age-old ukiyo-e methods and its stylised elegance.

American artist Chuck Close's Emma (2003), 113-colour ukiyo-e print completed with Japanese woodcut artist Yasu Shibata, is a western-style portrait built with a complex grid-based pattern. And Elizabeth Peyton's 95-colour ukiyo-e woodcut print, Flower Ben (2003), was recently put on the block at Christie's, with an estimated price of between US$8,000 and US$10,000.

Ukiyo-e's international appeal is not new. Western impressionists such as Monet and van Gogh were said to have been influenced by the Oriental scenes. And Julia Meech's 2001 book, Frank Lloyd Wright and the Art of Japan, documents the US architect's little-known second career as a dealer in ukiyo-e prints.

International museums are also aware of the draw of ukiyo-e. In November last year, 140 ukiyo-e prints went on display at the Shanghai Art Museum. Paris' Musee Guimet has an ongoing exhibition of 160 colour prints by Katsushika Hokusai, arguably the most celebrated ukiyo-e master of all, until August. And Barcelona's showing of 150 ukiyo-e prints on loan from the Bibliotheque Nationale de France is on until February next year.

The Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts (Nafa) in Singapore has just hosted a tribute exhibition to enigmatic ukiyo-e artist Toshusai Sharaku featuring works reimagining Sharaku by talents in the fields of art and graphic design.

Nafa's director of art and corporate knowledge, Bridget Tracy Tan, points out that the exhibition is relevant to the academy's students and visitors because it illustrates 'collaborative work, design and construction, publishing multiples and the notion of keeping traditional concepts alive using new media'.

The allure of pictures of the floating world in today's world resides not just on their surfaces - but in their spirit of innovation.

Yukio Fujimoto, one of the contemporary artists in the Sharaku show, captured the essence of ukiyo-e by creating exquisite music boxes which play disjointed yet beautiful tunes that correspond to the faces, bodies and backgrounds in Sharaku's prints. As he explains: 'Famous ukiyo-e painters like Sharaku and Hokusai tried to take in and digest the perspective of western art. I think that's why many are interested in Sharaku's work. Above all, we can praise his attitude to challenging something new.'

Kitamura expresses a similar view: 'Be it working with contemporary or traditional artists, the woodcarver is the same. In the Edo period, they were trying to do new things all the time.' Working with Shieh, he says, is just an extension of that drive to continually seek fresh solutions.

Besides, the democratic nature of ukiyo-e, originally conceived as cheap posters to bring art to the often-illiterate masses, is not at odds with the ever-expanding boundaries of contemporary art. Manga and anime, once thought disposable and commercial, are appropriated by many artists. Kitamura thinks the international taste for ukiyo-e stems partly from a curiosity about Japanese pop culture's roots.

'What I like about ukiyo-e,' Ogawa says, 'is that the original printers didn't do it as art. It's like cartoons, in today's context. In reality, both have a quality of their own.'

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